<![CDATA[This article examines the tension between procedural legitimacy and substantive popular sovereignty in Indonesia’s electoral democracy. Although post-authoritarian elections have become institutionally consolidated, they often prioritize formal vote aggregation over meaningful communicative engagement. This gap fosters clientelism, transactional politics, and weakened post-election accountability, reducing citizens to passive voters rather than active participants. Using qualitative library research, this study integrates Hanna Pitkin’s theory of political representation and Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the deliberative public sphere. It develops a conceptual framework reinterpreting elections as arenas for public reasoning and collective will formation. The findings suggest that procedural dominance weakens democratic legitimacy by separating electoral competition from rational deliberation. To address this, the article proposes a deliberative political contract-based model centered on three principles: informed consent, deliberative participation, and continuous accountability. Through this framework, citizens are positioned as active political subjects capable of shaping, monitoring, and evaluating binding political commitments. The study concludes that genuine democratic legitimacy requires evolving elections into deliberative spaces that encourage programmatic competition and enforceable accountability between representatives and citizens.]]>
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